Hope: A Tragedy

Solomon Kugel is obsessed with death: more specifically, how to die memorably. He moves to the dullest of locations, Stockton in New Jersey, because nothing ever happens there; has a morbid psychiatrist whom he can never reach on the telephone; and carries a list of potential last words in his pocket, which he updates constantly. His son Jonah is sickly and forcefed a cornucopia of vitamins, his wife Bree is alternately long-suffering and furious, and his mother has taken Holocaust survivor guilt to the next level, by believing that she had actually been sent to Auschwitz. With such a maelstrom of angst permeating his existence, it is to be expected that Kugel's life in the most unremarkable town in America will be anything but placid. Still, even Kugel could not have expected to find Anne Frank in his attic - and this at a time when a local arsonist is burning down farmhouses just like his…

Hilarious and gruesome by turns, Auslander's excursion into the mind of a dedicated paranoiac and self-obsessed neurotic fully merits an award for Book of the Year. His depiction of an ancient and baleful Anne Frank, of the mother who claims her family members have been turned into lampshades and soap by the Nazis, of sharp-tongued realtors, incensed lodgers and indignant wives, is nothing short of genius. The narrative arc - from Bree's fury at her mother-in-law's inability to die on time to Kugel's attempts to remove Anne Frank from his attic without being stigmatised by the media (Brutalized by Nazis, Tossed Out by a Jew: One Survivor's Story of Something, the headline would read)- is seamless; the dialogue - unpunctuated - entirely believable, and often brutally so. Hope: A Tragedy is not a book to inspire optimism, when one considers that according to Kugel's psychiatrist Hitler was history's greatest optimist; however, it does give the reader a little time, in between being convulsed with fury and laughter at the predetermined fatalism of it all, to work on their own memorable last words.